SEMI, Cadence, Mentor, a Siemens Business, and Synopsys announced plans to jointly develop an industry-standard protocol to combat electronic design automation (EDA) software piracy. Which according to the company, is a growing and costly problem for software vendors and their users.

Under the partnership, the organizations will develop the SEMI Server Certification Protocol, a standard that will provide protection against piracy by defining how servers can be uniquely identified.

According to the company, most software license management systems rely on a license manager that runs on a server typically identified by a machine identifier. The problem is that software pirates can clone the machine identifier due to virtualization technologies, to gain illegitimate access to many additional licenses without added cost.

The License Management/Anti-Piracy (LMA) Committee within the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance) will manage the partnership. Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys are members of the LMA Committee. The ESD Alliance is a SEMI Technology Community representing members in the electronic system and semiconductor design ecosystem.

The LMA Committee works with the Centralized Enterprise Licensing User Group (CELUG), a community within HPC Pros comprised of IT professionals and users of system design automation software to address common software licensing issues.

For more information, visit: http://esd-alliance.org/